The names Duggar and Dugard sound awfully similar…
Hmmm…
September 5, 2009Unexpected S&M
September 5, 2009My roommate is making jewelry right now, and it’s pretty badass, like, I’d pay for it if she weren’t my roommate and felt obligated to give it to me for free…beside the point. Any way, she’s got her gigantic toolbox down here and a number of different sized pliers and a ring sizer, which is looks like a Shaker S&M tool or something (I know, I know)…seriously, though, check it out.
http://www.amazon.com/Sizing-Stick-Sizes-Jewelers-Mandrel/dp/B000VNYRLY
Although hers is larger and black. D, this one’s for you.
Concord, Massachusetts
September 4, 2009Tomorrow I am going to Concord, Massachusetts to attend a friend’s wedding (yes, the friend who alerted me, once and for all, to the sinfully boring institution of registries.) Concord was the home of Thoreau and Emerson and Louisa May Alcott’s March family, a locus of New England literary life.
I have serious delusions of isolationism, but none of them take place in New England (perhaps because I am weary of the familiar.) Got to give props to my man Thoreau, though, the original society-shunner.
Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia’s Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe.
Now, of course, the name “Walden” has become a great selling point for a number of the areas local B&Bs. I myself will be staying at the Holiday Inn.
Nighttime in Chelsea
September 4, 2009
By my friend Linda
Ouch!
September 4, 2009My roommate, on Friday night, says, “You’re the only person I know who can take an absolute compliment and make it bad.”
A Dream
September 3, 2009I know Jean-Dominique Bauby in the film version (but NOT the book version!) of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly says people who talk about their dreams are “bores,” but I just had to share with you: last night in my dream I was shopping at a bodega, and there were two women there wearing full burkas, and I told them how lucky I thought they were.
Goodnight.
“I Caught a Glimpse of a God All Shining and Bright”
September 3, 2009The summer when I was twenty, I lived in a big old mansion on Riverside Drive in New York, in a room I had rented out from a friend. I was remarkably cut off from everything in the beginning of that season; the house’s thick walls and old carpeting were relics of a dead gilded age, and moving from that environment into the “real world” made me feel like a human prolepsis, not to mention I had lost my cell phone and broken my computer and had no television and very few people were living in the building at the time. My one source of entertainment for these particular three weeks was a) Tropic of Cancer and b) a stray CD given to this friend of mine by another friend’s boyfriend, who had very eclectic taste in music and went on to meet with some great success as the front man of a cheery, ironically (?) preppy indie band.
I can only remember two songs on the CD. One was 4 by Aphex Twin, and the other was a song by Kate Bush, the title of which I never knew UNTIL yesterday, when I managed to find it by Googling what I what was able to discern from the lyrics as “I don’t know why I’m crying” (a feat, if any of you listen to Kate Bush.) Though much of Kate Bush’s library is available on iTunes, this particular song, “Suspended in Gaffa,” is not. It is discordant and odd and haunting and energetic all at the same time. The lyrics are eerie…definitely contain some Biblical allusions that were always beyond me, or I’ve forgotten (aside from the camel and the eye and fitting through it thing. That one I got.) Below is the link. Enjoy!
Titles of Poems I Will Probably Never Write
September 2, 2009“It Is So Nice For Me That You Are a Stranger Now”
“Lullaby for Marlon Brando”
“Thoughts Upon Watching Reruns of Sex dnd the City”
“This Can Be the Piece That Suffers”
“My Laundry List”
“The Teaspoon and Co.”
“What They Told Me About You Is True”
“Cemetery Drive-Bys”
“The Nonexistent Book”
“Tiny Baroque Villages”
“Overwhelming Radiation”
“Things I’ve Lost to Water”
“Template”
“Where Have You Gone, Madame Bovary?”
“Belvedere Palace, Circa Now”
“Bourgeoisie Horror”
“Ten Thousand Reasons Why I Hate the Continent of Africa In No Particular Order”
Why Aren’t People This Quick and Mean in Real Life?
September 1, 2009
Audrey Hepburn in Charade
- Peter: We don’t know each other, do we?
- Reggie: Why? Do you think we’re going to?
- Peter: I don’t know — how would I know?
- Reggie: Because I already know an awful lot of people; until one of them dies, I couldn’t possibly meet anyone else.
- Peter: Mmm. Well, if anyone goes on the critical list, let me know.
(from Charade, 1963, starring Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant)
Ambien, Writ
September 1, 2009I’m trying out a new technique to help me fall asleep. It’s called Reading Jung. So far, it’s working out pretty well.
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